No, America isn't experiencing a version of China's cultural revolution

I don’t think the sides are as far apart as they think. The anti-woke liberal “Harper’s Letter” cited the case of David Shor, who was fired after sharing a link to a published political science paper showing that Democrats tend to lose vote share following violent protests. A counter to the Harper’s Letter also cited Shor’s firing as “indefensible.” This year, when black author Frederick Joseph launched a social media campaign that rapidly got a white woman fired over a video of a relatively mild confrontation at a dog park, it got widespread criticism. As Cathy Young put it, “even as zealous an anti-racism advocate as 1619 Project lead author Nikole Hannah-Jones” said Joseph’s actions were unethical.

I think if a zealous advocate of anti-racism says this cancellation was wrong, then the number of people who actually believe that, as Young put it when defining wokeness, “All claims and accounts of identity-based oppression, abuse, or prejudice must be accorded the presumption of belief; to challenge or deny them is oppressive” isn’t large. And the number who actually believe in Bari Weiss’s conception, in which everyone’s placed on “a spectrum of ‘privileged’ to ‘oppressed’” where the latter “bullying” the former is “very, very good,” is quite small. The Joseph case shows it’s real. It also shows that the extreme version faces large cultural opposition.

I think we should disaggregate cancel culture and left-wing identity politics. Cancellation should be understood as an internet phenomenon. Social media provides the tools to highlight individuals who supposedly crossed the line, organize pressure campaigns, and publicly shame them and their employers. If it ever was just something the left does, it isn’t anymore.